La Colombe Torrefaction -Cafe @ 130 S 19th St.

I said this blog is going to be about finding lunch. I wander a bit here. La Colombe is not a restaurant to find a quick bite for lunch. In fact it is just a cafe where they have some great Coffee and baked items that would qualify them for a good breakfast.

My intention of this blog is to find quick and inexpensive places for working professionals in and around Center City Philadelphia. Breakfast is an important meal to many and I decided to include cafes and breakfasts places as well in my blog. Having justified the reason for my wandering I request you to kindly read along.

I was compelled to visit this place about 3 months ago after reading a great review in a travel magazine. The magazine raved this place as the best coffee house in Philadelphia and I was bound to check it out. Today was my second visit to this place after a long time. I just had their coffee on my first visit.

I got myself a small coffee and a muffin with poppy seeds. The barista behind the counter was a guy named Rad or so I heard him pronounce after asking him twice. He was nice unlike the lady on my first visit. She was in a mood to send me off from her sight. I decided to give them a second chance as the coffee was good and I liked certain things about the place that I will describe later on.

The place is on the road side of a residential building in the rich Rittenhouse Square region. I found myself looking for this place on the chestnut street and on 19th street between chestnut and market as I did not vision a cheap coffee shop at Rittenhouse square. So I did some googling the next around and went to the cafe around 6:00PM. Even today I made it around 6:15 PM. I don’t find time to visit a breakfast place in the morning. But some do as most of my colleagues do and I thought this review would be nice for those trying to find a good breakfast and coffee in the morning.

The place has the feel of good campus cafe where students hang out with their books doing their project work excepting that here there were mostly young professionals from the city having a good time after work. The place is noisy with couples and group of friends chatting out loud. The cafe is not a place for a serious read. The ambiance has an earthly theme in color of the walls and the furniture. The walls have photos of kids from Uganda and proceeds from the sale of these go to charity. The first time I visited, they had pictures of Hispanic community from Scranton. That was a home run for me to come back to this place.

The coffee was served in a beautiful porcelain cup and not in a paper cup which adds to the appeal. The cup had roosters on them and the design was maroon in color. It gives it feel of a restaurant or a laid back country side cafe to it. These cups were comfortably heavy and easy to hold.

On the rear end of the counter they had regular sugar, brown sugar, honey, whole milk etc where you can help yourself after the coffee is given to you. They even had sugar in straw like packets which were better than the regular rectangular color coded packets with which you are fighting to bring the sugar out invariably spilling some out of the cup.

I paid 2 bucks for the coffee and 1.25 for the muffin. The cost of muffin was alright, but I felt the coffee was priced a little higher. $1.5 bucks would have been the right price.

The muffin was really good. Not too much sugar and crumby so as to take bites easily. It was not sticky or very sweet like the ones at Dunkin Donuts. The coffee was a dark roast I assume and the coffee was a little strong. I have to admit the coffee had a good flavor with sugar and whole milk that I added to make it milder. They normally have 3 types of roasts. You can ask the kind of roast you like. But you would know them only if you have been several times before as they do not have a menu display or menu card handout. So I asked what they server other than coffee. They have regular, decaf, americano, lattes, cappuccinos, muffins, bagels, Danish, biscottis etc.

I am sure this would be great place to grab a quick breakfast and coffee in the morning for work. They close at 6:30PM which makes it good for a small get together with old friends/colleagues after work. I also found that they have one place in Manayunk and one in Manhattan opened recently. They are fully owned by a French and American guys and do not have any franchises but they do a lot of retail and coffee selling as their core business.

There are certain things they could improve upon. I would like to see it close a little late, may be around 8:00PM and have more items to eat in the evening. The muffin I had was the last one and other than that all they had were packed biscotti. Overall it a great cafe but the coffee was expensive than Starbucks. Starbucks coffee by itself is a premium coffee place. Adding a menu display would help a lot for newcomers.